Clarkson an irreplaceable ingredient for hit show.

Why Top Gear should be parked for good

Whether it slams into a wall at high speed or runs out of momentum over a course of years, the smash-hit show has lost the fuel driving one of the most successful programs on television.

Brash and opinionated, Clarkson was often controversial but never boring, a polarising character loved and hated by both sides of the argument for political correctness.

The problem for the BBC is that he cannot be replaced.

Producers for the show have tried replicating the electric on-screen chemistry held by Clarkson and co-hosts James May and Richard Hammond to no avail.

An Australian spin-off took a cookie-cutter approach to the Top Gear formula, starting with Kenny star Shane Jacobson in the big chair, bookish enthusiast Warren Brown in the place of the similarly eccentric May, and an energetic Steve Pizzati in Hammond's place as a boyish punchline.

End of an era: Top Gear is unlikley to thrive without key presenter Jeremy Clarkson (centre).

Those ingredients did not translate to local success, and the show struggled in the face of comparisons with the British behemoth, fizzing out before finding its own identity.

Similar efforts in the US and other markets haven't taken off to the same extent.

Plainly, Clarkson's buffoonery can't be replicated – and the BBC is unlikely to source a similarly forthright and divisive host on the back of scandal after scandal perpetuated by its biggest star.

Nor should it try. For every golden moment, Clarkson offended with views seen as racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic and out of touch by scores of viewers that switched away from the publicly funded program.

End of an era: Top Gear is unlikley to thrive without key presenter Jeremy Clarkson (centre).

Top Gear's future is at a crossroads. The BBC has indicated it is evaluating whether to soldier on with spare parts, keeping the machine going in hope it can return to the glory days, but I think it should park it.

Clarkson's behaviour is abhorrent and his political incorrectness has worn thin. But Top Gear without Clarkson is like a three-wheeled car – it can still move, but it just doesn't work properly.

Ending the program now could prove to be the more humane approach, taking the vehicle off the road so that people can remember it as the modern classic it was, rather than the bent and broken bomb it would become.